Director Chang Tso-chi’s (張作驥) cinematic world is usually populated by social underdogs, gangsters and men trapped in vicious cycles of violence. But in When Love Comes (當愛來的時候), his newest film, females take center stage in a tale that follows the road to reconciliation and understanding that the members of an extended family travel down.
Chang’s latest drama begins with 16-year-old Laichun (Li Yi-chieh, 李亦捷) walking through a bustling eatery in a traditional market. We quickly learn it’s a family business and the voice and thoughts of the teenage girl transport us into her hectic family life.
Her father, Dark Face (Lin Yu-shun, 林郁順), comes from a poor family in Kinmen and married Xue Feng (Lu Xue-feng, 呂雪鳳), whose wealthy family lacks a male heir. Xue Feng is infertile and allows Dark Face to keep his childhood lover Zhihua (He Zi-hua, 何子華), who bears him two daughters (Laichun and Lairi) and a boy, as a concubine. They all live together under one roof, but home life is far from easygoing.
Photo courtesy of Swallow Wings
Jie, Dark Face’s autistic younger brother, moves in with the family, causing yet more squabbles. Domestic quarrels soon turn into a full-blown crisis when Laichun becomes pregnant and her boyfriend disappears.
The family’s females- — its powerful matriarch, dutiful mistress and teenager struggling to come to terms with the abrupt end to her adolescence — dominate the house. Dark Face is meek but thoughtful, a henpecked figure dissimilar to any of the father characters in Chang’s previous works, which include drunks, gamblers and irresponsible men who abandon their families.
Chang’s trademark fatalism mellows when toward the end of the film tragedy strikes and the women band together, offering each other solace.
Photo courtesy of Swallow Wings
The director imbues his characters with warmth and humor and constructs an authentic family setting that could easily have veered off into the melodramatic in less talented hands.
Known for his cold treatment of the world in films like The Best of Times (美麗時光, 2002) and Soul of a Demon (蝴蝶, 2008), and giving his desperate protagonists magical moments that allow them to temporarily escape the cruelty of their lives, with When Love Comes the director seems to have broken many of his filmmaking habits.
Photo courtesy of Swallow Wings
Towering high above Taiwan’s capital city at 508 meters, Taipei 101 dominates the skyline. The earthquake-proof skyscraper of steel and glass has captured the imagination of professional rock climber Alex Honnold for more than a decade. Tomorrow morning, he will climb it in his signature free solo style — without ropes or protective equipment. And Netflix will broadcast it — live. The event’s announcement has drawn both excitement and trepidation, as well as some concerns over the ethical implications of attempting such a high-risk endeavor on live broadcast. Many have questioned Honnold’s desire to continues his free-solo climbs now that he’s a
As Taiwan’s second most populous city, Taichung looms large in the electoral map. Taiwanese political commentators describe it — along with neighboring Changhua County — as Taiwan’s “swing states” (搖擺州), which is a curious direct borrowing from American election terminology. In the early post-Martial Law era, Taichung was referred to as a “desert of democracy” because while the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) was winning elections in the north and south, Taichung remained staunchly loyal to the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). That changed over time, but in both Changhua and Taichung, the DPP still suffers from a “one-term curse,” with the
Jan. 26 to Feb. 1 Nearly 90 years after it was last recorded, the Basay language was taught in a classroom for the first time in September last year. Over the following three months, students learned its sounds along with the customs and folktales of the Ketagalan people, who once spoke it across northern Taiwan. Although each Ketagalan settlement had its own language, Basay functioned as a common trade language. By the late 19th century, it had largely fallen out of daily use as speakers shifted to Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese), surviving only in fragments remembered by the elderly. In
Lines between cop and criminal get murky in Joe Carnahan’s The Rip, a crime thriller set across one foggy Miami night, starring Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. Damon and Affleck, of course, are so closely associated with Boston — most recently they produced the 2024 heist movie The Instigators there — that a detour to South Florida puts them, a little awkwardly, in an entirely different movie landscape. This is Miami Vice territory or Elmore Leonard Land, not Southie or The Town. In The Rip, they play Miami narcotics officers who come upon a cartel stash house that Lt. Dane Dumars (Damon)
RSS